Piece Description

Singer Al Hibbler was born in Mississippi in 1920, blind at birth, and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he studied voice at the Conservatory for the Blind. He began to work with local bands as a teenager, singing the blues at juke joints and bars around Texas and Arkansas, touring with territory bands, and eventually got an audition with Duke Ellington-but, as Hibbler later told the story, he turned up drunk and Ellington passed on hiring him, saying, "I can handle a blind man, but not a blind drunk."

Still, Hibbler kept at it and got his break in the early 1940s with Jay McShann's band, then began to sit in with Duke Ellington's band in 1943 during the band's long stay at New York City's Hurricane nightclub. The audiences responded well to Hibbler, and eventually he told Ellington he couldn't keep sitting in for free-to which Ellington replied, "Go get your money, you've been in the band for two weeks."

"Tonal Pantomime"

Hibbler became a valuable fixture in the 1940s Ellington band, spotlighted on blues and ballads, and while critics would generally have a lifelong ambivalence about his emphatic and weighty manner of singing-"You could drive a truck through that vibrato," one musician said-he did well in the jazz press polls of the time. Decades later Ellington would praise Hibbler in his memoir Music Is My Mistress, writing that "Hib's great dramatic devices and the variety of his tonal changes give him almost unlimited range...he can produce a whispering, confidential sound, or an outburst that borders on panic. He will adopt a nasal tone at just the right word and note, or affect a sudden drop to what sounds like the below-compass bass. Cries, laughs, and highly animated calls-he uses them all to make the listener see it as he sees it." Ellington called Hibbler's style "tonal pantomime," and it served the singer well on numbers both haunting and earthy, such as "Strange Feeling" and "I'm Just a Lucky So-and-So."